The Saga of the Renunciates (93 page)

A day or two later, she found Marisela, the Guild-house’s senior midwife, enjoying a rare moment of solitude in the music room, idly strumming a
rryl
. But when Magda apologized for her intrusion and would have gone away again, Marisela set down the small lap-harp, and said, “Please don’t go. I haven’t really anything to do with myself, and I was only killing time pretending I could play. Do sit down and talk to me. We never see each other these days.”

Magda sat down and watched as Marisela put the instrument into its case.

“Remind me to tell Rafaella that a string has broken; I took it off, but could not replace it. Well, Margali, do you just want to chat, or do you want to ask me something?”

Magda asked, “Do you remember when I was first in the house, during my housebound time? In my first Training Session, I saw a vision of the Goddess Avarra. I know it came from the Sisterhood. And now again I have encountered—Marisela, will you tell me something about the Sisterhood?”

Marisela fiddled with the clasps on the instrument case.

“There was a time,” she said after a moment, “when I felt you were ready for the Sisterhood, and would willingly have had you among us. But when you left the Guild-house, you went elsewhere for the training of your
laran
. For that reason, I do not feel free to discuss the secrets of the Sisterhood with you. I can tell you nothing, my dear. I am sure you are as well among the Forbidden Tower as with us, and if there was ever a time when I resented your choice, it was long ago. But I am sorry. I may not talk of this to an outsider.”

Magda felt a sense of total frustration. She said, “If these people who call themselves the Dark Sisterhood reached out to me, how can you say I am an outsider? If they spoke to me—”

“If they did,” repeated Marisela. “Oh, no, my dear, I am sure you are not lying, but when this happened, you were under great stress. This much I can say: the Sisterhood are those who serve Avarra; we on the plane which we call physical life, and they, the Dark Ones, on the plane of existence known as the overworld. I suppose—in such extremity—if you have the talent of reaching out into it, they might hear you from the overworld and relay a message. You are strongly gifted with
laran
; you may have reached Those Who Hear, and they may have answered you from where they dwell.” Deliberately, she changed the subject.

“But now, tell me what you have been doing with yourself these last few years. I haven’t really had a chance to talk with you since your daughter was born. Is she well and thriving? Was she a big, strong baby? You told Doria that she was weaned—how long did you feed her yourself?”

“Something less than a year,” Magda replied, not really sorry to abandon the frustrating topic, and perfectly willing to satisfy the midwife’s professional interest. “When she began to cut her teeth, I was quite ready and glad to say to her, if you are big enough to bite, you are big enough to bite bread!”

With an unexpected pang of homesickness she missed her daughter, the small wriggling body in her arms, snuggled sleepily in her lap, struggling to escape being combed or dressed, scampering naked from the bath… “She is very strong and seems to me very intelligent and quick, very independent for two years old. She actually tries to put on her own clothes. Of course she can’t yet; gets stuck with her tunic over her head and yells for her nurse to come and get her loose. But she tries! She says
Mama
, but she doesn’t always mean me, she says it to Jaelle, to Ellemir—”

“I have never met the Lady Ellemir, but Ferrika and Jaelle have spoken of her. I always thought you would have no trouble in bearing children. Did you have a difficult time?”

“I had nothing to compare it with. I thought it hard,” Magda said, “but not nearly as bad as it was for Jaelle.”

“I have never had a chance to ask Jaelle about it. Was it difficult for her? I expected that if she had one child, she would want another.”

“She did; but Ferrika advised against it. Cleindori is thriving; she was five last Spring Festival.”

“What a very peculiar name for a child, to name her after the
kireseth
flower!”

“Her name is Dorilys; it is a family name among the Ardais, I understand, and Lady Rohana was Jaelle’s foster-mother. But she is golden-haired, and her nurse dresses her always in blue, so that Ferrika said one day, she looks like a bell of the flower all covered in golden pollen. She is so pretty no one can deny her anything, so of course she’s dreadfully spoiled; but she has such a sweet disposition, it seems to have done her no harm. She is very quick and clever, too, already the other girls pet and spoil her, and the boys all treat her as a little queen.”

“And I dare say you do homage, too,” Marisela said, laughing, and Magda admitted it.

“Oh, she has always been my special darling. When Shaya was born, I expected Cleindori to be jealous, but she isn’t. She insists that this is her very own little sister, and wants to share everything with her. When Shaya was only two months old we found her trying to dress the baby up in her own best Holiday tunic, and I have forgotten how many times we had to remind her that it was very nice to be generous, but that Shaya could not eat spicebread or nutcake till she had her teeth!”

“Better that the natural rivalry should take that form, than jealousy,” remarked Marisela. “She has decided to rival you as mother, instead of Shaya as baby.” It was not the first time Magda had been surprised at the woman’s psychological insight. It had been a salutary lesson for Magda, who had thought for a long time that a non-technological culture would have no advanced psychological knowledge. But of course, if Marisela belonged to the Sisterhood, whose special province was to train the
laran
and psi skills of those outside the normal system of the Towers, it was not at all surprising. Magda’s own awareness of mental processes had increased a thousandfold when she began to explore her
laran
.

“And the father,” Marisela asked, “did he follow custom and stay with you for the birth?”

“He would have done, if I had asked him,” Magda said, “but since he agreed to make no claim, it was Jaelle I asked to be with me; Jaelle, and Lady Callista.” She had never told anyone—although Marisela would certainly have understood—that in the profound helplessness and power of birth, it had somehow been Camilla she had wanted with her. She would never tell that to anyone, not even to Camilla. Instead, she changed the subject.

“But tell me now what our sister Keitha is doing. I understand she studied midwifery both at Arilinn and with the Terrans—”

“And she will go next month to Neskaya, to teach the midwives the new skills she learned from the Terrans; and after that, to Nevarsin, to establish a Guild-house of midwives in that city. The
cristoforo
brethren do not like it, but there is nothing they can do. They can hardly say that they wish women to die in childbirth when they can be saved, can they?”

Magda agreed that they could not, although they might like to; but the choice of subject was an unfortunate one, as it reminded her of what Camilla had said of the Sisterhood: that they had been formed to do for women, in the darkest years of the Ages of Chaos, what the
cristoforo
brethren had done for men—to keep a little learning alive despite Chaos and ignorance. And it also reminded her that Marisela had refused to tell what she knew.

There’s no reason you should have to stay here,” Magda said. “This is my problem, and Cholayna doesn’t need you. You could go back to Armida and to the children.”

Jaelle shook her head. “No,
breda
. As long as you have to stay, do you think I would leave you here alone?”

“It’s not as if I were exactly alone,” Magda pointed out to her. “I have Cholayna, and everybody in Bridge if I need them, not to mention a whole Guild-house full of our sisters. I’d really feel better about it if I knew you were with the children, Shaya.”

Jaelle n’ha Melora laughed. “Margali, of all the arguments you might have given me, that is the one least likely to make any impression! How much time do I spend with either of the children? I should be there to give her an admiring hug at bedtime? As long as Ellemir is there, and her nurse, and Ferrika—with a whole houseful of nurses and nannies, with Ellemir to supervise them and Andrew to spoil them, I doubt if they know we are gone.”

This was true, more or less, and Magda knew it. If anything, Jaelle was far less domestic, and less interested in little children, than was Magda herself. Jaelle loved Cleindori—as who did not?—but since the little girl had been weaned, spent little time in her daughter’s company.

She thought again, as she had thought before, that Jaelle had really changed very little since they had met: a small, slight woman with hair only slightly faded from its early tint of new-minted copper; she had the fragile look of many Comyn—Damon had it, and Callista—but Magda knew it was deceptive, and concealed the delicate strength of ancient forged steel.

In many ways, Jaelle is the strongest of us all. They say the Aillard women have always been the best Keepers; perhaps the post of Keeper was designed for their kind of strength
. But Jaelle’s strength was not
laran
. Perhaps they did not yet know what her true strength would be.

We are both at the age
, Magda thought,
at which a woman should have decided what she wants to do with her life. I have outgrown first love, first marriage, early ideals. I have a child, and have recovered my strength and health. I have work I love. I have made some decisions
—
I know many of the things I do
not
want to do with my life. I have developed my
laran
and I know that my love and my strongest emotions are given to women. But I am not yet really sure what it is given to me to do with my life
. And this disturbed her so much that she had no heart to argue with Jaelle.

“Stay if you wish. But I can’t imagine wanting to stay in the City when you could be out in the country, at Armida.”

Jaelle looked up toward the skyline, where the Venza Mountains overshadowed the pass that led down into the city. “You feel it too? I would like to be out again on the trail. I have done my duty to clan and family, and when Dori is only a little older, I shall send her to be fostered as a daughter of Aillard. And then—oh, Magda, aren’t you eager to be in the field again, traveling in the mountains? Rafaella wants me to come back to work with her; she’s talking about some new special project for the Terrans, but won’t tell me any details until I promise I’ll join her. It would be hard to leave the Tower, and I would miss it, but—couldn’t I take a year away, just to travel again? It’s been so long! I never spent so long in one place in my whole life as I have spent at Armida! Five years, Magda!”

Magda smiled indulgently. “I’m sure they would give you leave to spend a year in the mountains if you wished.”

“I heard the other day that there is an expedition going to climb High Kimbi. It’s never been climbed—”

“And probably never will be,” Magda said. “Not by cither of us, in any case. You know as well as I do they wouldn’t have women along, not even as guides. If there are still men who think women unfit to be part of anything facing danger or demanding courage, they are the men who go out climbing mountains.”

Jaelle snorted. “I led a trade caravan over the Pass of Scaravel when I was not yet eighteen!”

“
Breda
, I know what you can do on the trail. And Rafaella is listed in Intelligence Services as the best mountain guide in the business! But there are still men who won’t use women guides. The more fools they.”

Jaelle shrugged philosophically. “I guess if we want to climb High Kimbi, or Dammerung Peak, we’ll have to organize our own expedition.”

Magda laughed. “Forget the
we
part, Jaelle.
You
would have to do it. That one trip across Scaravel was enough to last me a lifetime.” Even remembering, she shivered at the thought of the cliffs and chasms of the Pass of Scaravel.

“Talk to Camilla. She’d probably be delighted to go out and climb anything inaccessible you can find.”

“And knowing you, you’ll be right beside her.” Jaelle laughed. “You talk about being timid, but when you’re actually in the field—I know you better than you know yourself.”

“Whether or no,” Magda said, “for the moment we are in Thendara, and here we will stay, for the next few days, at least.”

“We should relay a message to Armida, though. They’ll be expecting us,” Jaelle reminded her. “They should be told that we are all right—not murdered by bandits on the trail, or something of that sort.”

“No,” Magda said morosely, “only murdered here in Thendara, by bureaucratic nonsense! Shall we get in touch with them tonight?”

“You do it, Magda, you’re a far better telepath than I am.”

“But they will want to hear from us both,” Magda said, and Jaelle nodded soberly.

“Tonight, then, when it’s quiet.”

But that night there was an Oath-taking in the house. Although neither the new Renunciate nor her Oath-sisters were known to Magda or Jaelle, they could not in decency absent themselves from such festivities in their own house. Afterward there was a party with cakes and wine; Magda, knowing what lay ahead of her, drank sparingly. She spent most of the evening with Camilla and Mother Lauria, and found herself agreeing how very young the new Renunciates appeared. It seemed that the woman who had taken the Oath tonight, and her friends who had witnessed the Oath, were just children. Had she and Jaelle ever been as young as that? Apart from the Oath-mother, an older woman was always chosen to witness the ceremony, and it seemed incredible to see Doria, whom Magda remembered as a girl of fifteen sharing her own housebound time, described as an older woman.

Rafaella was there, and spent much of the latter part of the evening talking with Jaelle; Magda did not begrudge Jaelle the company of her old friend and partner, but, watching Rafi drinking heavily of the pale wine from the mountain vineyards, she hoped Jaelle would not be led into drinking. It was late before they could get away to the room they shared—but that was just as well. The atmosphere was quieter at night, with most people sleeping; much matrix work, in the Towers and outside them, was done between sunset and sunrise.

“What was Rafi talking about?”

“Some new project from Mapping and Exploring—a survey in the mountains. She wanted me to promise I’d come.” Jaelle looked regretful as she pulled off her low indoor boots and untied the laces of her tunic. Magda sat on the bed to remove her own.

“Did you promise?”

“How could I? I told her I would have to consult you, and also the folk in the Tower. I do not think she knows we have sworn oath as freemates, and I had no opportunity to tell her.”

“Perhaps it is as well not to tell her.”

“You told Camilla.”

“But Camilla is not jealous. Rafaella and I have worked out a pact for mutual co-existence—we even manage to like each other most of the time—but she is jealous of our closeness, Jaelle.”

“Rafi and I were never lovers, Margali. At least, not since I was a little girl. She was really not much more. And now, at least, Rafaella is certainly a lover of men. What may have been between us when we were young girls does not seem that important to me, and I cannot believe it is important to her.” Jaelle shivered, standing barefoot on the icy floor, and quickly pulled her nightgown over her head.

“That is not what she is jealous of.” Magda wondered why Jaelle could not see it. “What she envies is that we work together, that we share
laran
. And that is closer than any other bond.” She hurried into her warm nightgown and warmer robe, for the Guild-house was not well-heated at night. “Will you monitor, Jaelle, or do you want me to do it?”

“I will. That’s about my level of skill.” Jaelle had no illusions about her competence working with
laran
. She had spent half a lifetime blocking away her psychic gift, submitting to the training only when the
laran
could not be excluded from her consciousness. Now, she knew, she could achieve only the minimal level of training: sufficient to keep her from being, in the phrase so often used about untrained telepaths, a menace to herself and everyone around her.

Jaelle was, and was glad to be, an integral part of the group of telepaths and psi workers, loosely allied, who worked outside the ordinary structure of matrix workers on Darkover, and in defiance called themselves the Forbidden Tower. But she would never achieve sufficient competence to call herself matrix mechanic or technician. Sometimes when she watched Magda, born a Terran, and now the most skillful of technicians, she was painfully aware that she had cast away that birthright, and could now never recover it.

They were both wearing warm, fur-lined robes, fur-lined slippers. Magda wrapped herself in an extra blanket. Psychic work withdrew heat from the body. If the worker stayed out too long on the astral planes known collectively as the overworld, it could result in painful chill.

Jaelle took her matrix, from the tiny leather bag around her neck, and carefully stripped away the protecting silks. The blue stone, no larger than the nail of her little finger, glinted with pallid fires.

She spoke aloud, though it was not really necessary; from the moment Magda had taken out her matrix, they had been in contact.

“Match resonances—”

Magda was aware first of the physical heat and mass of Jaelle’s body, though she did not look at the other woman; her eyes were fixed within the matrix, seeing only the moving lights in the stone. She sensed the living energy fields of Jaelle’s body near her, the pulsing spots where the life currents moved. Then, delicately, she moved to match the vibration of her stone to Jaelle’s, feeling it as a point of—was it heat, light, some indefinable energy moving in the room? Nothing so tangible as these. She felt her heartbeat altering slightly, pulsing with the ebb and flow of the energies of the matched stones, knew that the very blood in her veins and arteries moved in cadence with the other woman’s.

She sensed, like a hand passing over her body, the monitoring touch of Jaelle, scanning her to make certain that all was well in her body before she withdrew her consciousness from it, aware of everything, even noticing the graze on her ankle where she had skidded the other day on a pebble, the slight clogging of her sinuses— she must have encountered something in the HQ today to which she was mildly allergic; she noticed it, as Jaelle moved energies to clear the condition.

Neither spoke, but she picked it up as Jaelle finished:

Ready?

I’m going out.

Magda let her consciousness slip free of her body and looked down, seeing herself lying apparently unconscious on the bed they shared. Jaelle, blanket-wrapped, sat beside her. With total irrelevance, she thought.
That old robe of mine is really getting too old and grubby, I shall have to have a new one before long. What a pity I hate sewing so much
. She could have requisitioned a new one from Supplies, in the Terran HQ, but she had lived in the Guild-house too long to see that as a workable solution.

Then she was up and out of the room, finding herself alone in the gray and featureless plain of the overworld. After a moment, Jaelle stood beside her. As always in the overworld, Jaelle seemed smaller, slighter, more fragile, and Magda wondered, as she had wondered before, whether what she saw was a projection of the way Jaelle saw herself, or whether it reflected the way in which, for some reason, she had always felt protective, as if Jaelle were younger and weaker than herself.

Around them stretched grayness in every direction, colorless and without, form. In the distance, figures drifted. Some of them, Magda knew, were their fellow pilgrims on the non-physical planes of existence; some had merely strayed from their bodies in dreams or meditation. She could see none of them clearly as yet, for she had not yet marked her own path with will and purpose.

Now, in the clearing dimness as what looked like fog dispersed, she could see faint landmarks in the gray. First, foremost, she saw a shining structure, rising tall on the plain, which she knew to be the landmark made on these planes by the thought-form called the Forbidden Tower—shelter from the nothingness of the astral world. Her home, the home she had found for her spirit, shared with those who meant more to her even than the Sisterhood of the Guild-house. She still observed meticulously every provision of the Renunciate Oath; she was a Free Amazon not only in word but in spirit. But the Guild-house could no longer contain the fullness of her being.

With the speed of thought—for what she imagined in the overworld was literally true—she was standing beside the Tower itself. Simultaneously she was inside it, in what appeared to be, complete in every detail, the upstairs suite in the Great House of Armida. She had come so late to this work that she had never quite accustomed herself to how time and space behaved on this plane.

All four of the rooms were empty—she could see them all at once, in a way she did not understand—but somewhere, there was the blue glow of a matrix where someone of the Tower kept watch. And then, without a moment of transition, Callista Lanart-Carr was beside her.

Magda knew rationally that Callista was not as beautiful in body as she looked in the overworld. In this case at least she was seeing Callista through the eyes of the spirit and through the eyes of her love and veneration for this woman who was at the center of the heart and spirit of the Forbidden Tower. In reality (but what, after all, was reality, and which was the illusion?)—on the material plane of existence, Callista Lanart-Carr, once Keeper at Arilinn, was a tall, frail-looking woman, her red hair faded almost to silvery gray, though she was not much past thirty; her body was sagging from the three children she had borne, and her face was lined and careworn. Yet on this plane, at least for Magda, Callista had the radiant beauty of early youth.

Magda knew that she did not speak, but speech and sound were irrelevant here. It seemed to her that Callista cried out a joyful greeting.

“Magda! Jaelle! Oh, we have been expecting to see you—”

And suddenly they were surrounded by the others of the Tower circle, Ellemir and Andrew and Damon, summoned quickly from dreams or sleep. Damon’s brother Kieran was there too, and Kieran’s son Kester, and Lady Hilary Castamir-Syrtis, who like Callista had once been Keeper in Arilinn. It seemed to both Magda and Jaelle that for a moment they were encompassed in an instant love-feast of greeting, made up of all the kisses and embraces and tenderness they had ever known, without time or the limits of the body, and it lasted (in reality, Magda knew, a spirt second or less) a long time.

At last, reluctantly, the intensity of loving communion ebbed (although Magda knew in some deeper reality that it would always be a part of her, always renewed and reassuring), and Ellemir said, “But my dears, we expected to have you here more than a tenday ago. I know the weather in Thendara is harsh sometimes, but I have heard of no storms, even in the pass. What has happened?”

With a humorous question from someone
—
Kester
? —
wanting to know what pleasures of the big city kept them away, friends, lovers
—
something like a swift reprimand for this intrusion from Damon
—
Ellemir’s ill-concealed wonder that anything could keep two mothers from their children
—
Andrew’s special enfolding of Magda in something that was very private between them, a bond of shared experiences stronger than love
—

“Cholayna had need for me, and Jaelle stayed to keep me company,” Magda told them, and swiftly shared the knowledge of the downed plane in the Hellers. Something might have drifted through into the overworld.

She felt Andrew’s surge of anger like a dull flame of colors, crimson and burnt orange, surrounding the outline of his body; she could sometimes see this even when they were both in their bodies. Here it was unmistakable.

“They should not have asked it of you, Magda.”
Damn the Anders woman, nothing was worth doing that to you. That is like the Terrans, their damnable Need to Know, regardless. They have no idea of human needs
—

“That’s too strong, Andrew. Cholayna made a point of telling me I could refuse.”

Andrew dismissed that. “You should have refused. I’ll bet you didn’t find out anything worth knowing.”

“I did bring Lexie back,” Magda defended herself. “She might have stayed like that indefinitely! And there was more.” On an impulse, she shared quickly with Callista the image with which she had come away from Lexie’s mind.

Robed figures, deep hoods. The sound of crows calling, drifting through a silence deeper than the depths of the overworld…

Momentarily she could sense that Callista did not find it new, not quite.

I have encountered strange
leroni
in the overworld, now and again
, Callista’s memory reached them all at once.
Not often, and only a glimmering. Once when I was very ill
—her mind edged away from the ordeal in which she had been made Keeper at Arilinn—
and again when I was trapped in the other planes of the overworld and could reach nothing familiar. I remember the calling of strange birds, and dark forms, and little more. Your friend—Alexis?—if, in extremity, she teleported herself from the crashed plane, she may have crossed some strange places in the overworld. I truly do not think it was more than that, Margali.

“But what of the crashed plane? And no trace of it found—”

“I have a theory for that, too,” said Damon, and the familiar sensation of warmth, strength, protection
(their Keeper, closer than a lover, the figure around whom the Forbidden Tower had gathered, the only one in all the Domains who had had the courage for this, to restore Hilary and Callista to full strength in spite of the laws which forbade a failed Keeper from ever again taking up her
laran,
their shelter and their strength and their lover and their father all at once)
…

Again the disparity from what Magda knew as “reality” and how Damon appeared here in the overworld: in real life, a small, darkhaired, insignificant-looking man with fading hair and tired eyes, showing his age—he was a good twenty years older than Andrew, who was somewhat older than Ellemir or Callista. But here where the things of the spirit were made manifest, Damon appeared to be a tall, strong and imposing man, who gave the impression of a warrior. It had taken a warrior to resist the power of Leonie Hastur, the Keeper of Arilinn, who ruled all the Towers in the Domains with the same iron hand with which her twin brother, Lorill Hastur, ruled the Domains. Damon had won from Leonie, in a psychic battle against terrible odds, the right to establish what was now called, defiantly, the Forbidden Tower.

“I have a theory about the disappearance of your plane,” Damon said. “If the Anders woman truly summoned up, from latency in her mind, a new psi skill and teleported herself—and that’s not impossible, I saw Callista do it when we were imprisoned among the catmen—the pure energy had to come from somewhere. She did not, of course, have a matrix,” Damon added. The matrix stones were crystals which had the curious property of transforming thought-waves into energy without transition by-products.